Suggestions (Gale Online 2 - V.)

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Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

    V. is "about" plotting in this disturbing sense inasmuch as it
raises questions about history within its own structure. The chapters
taking place in the narrative present, in the years 1956 and 1957, are
punctuated by chapters set at various times in the previous
three-quarters of a century. The jumps between "past" and "present" are
violent and to some extent unexplained. In some cases the reader can be
reasonably sure that one of the protagonists, Herbert Stencil, is
narrating the "historical" story, but in other cases it is radically
unclear where the story is coming from or why it occurs at this point in
the "present" action. The problem of connections thus becomes a major
concern of the reader, who in making sense of Pynchon's novel is
suddenly immersed in the same enterprise as Stencil himself.
    Stencil's activity, a form of quest, involves looking through
segments of recent history for manifestations of a woman known to him
only as V. In the process Stencil serves as a persona of the reader, for
as Melvyn New notes in the Georgia Review, "While Herbert Stencil
searches for clues to the meaning of the woman, V., accumulating his
notecards, his sources, his linkages, we, as readers, parallel his
activity, making our own accumulations, driven by the same urge to fit
the pieces together, to arrive at the meaning of the novel V." The
central dilemma of this quest depends on the double meaning of "plot."
If the connections that Stencil discerns between the events of history
are real, they seem to be evidence of a conspiracy bringing the
twentieth century to a state of apocalyptic decadence, a situation
analogous to the entropic run-down posited by thermodynamic theory as
the terminus of the physical universe. If these connections are not
real, but only projected out of a need to find order in the events of
history, historical events become meaningless: uncaused and unmotivated,
and causing and motivating nothing in the present.
    (continued)

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.